We were introduced to the work of The Four Humors several years ago at the Minnesota Fringe Festival when they put on a screamingly funny rendition of Lolita. It played with tropes of Lolita, which is about a middle-aged professor’s sexual obsession with his step-daughter, by casting as Lolita a 6 foot tall, 260 lb man, half-shaven, who wore a shirt about a size too small, and was suitably coarse about the whole thing. The entire audience was caught on the horns of a man who wanted to make passionate love to a virginal young girl, who just happened to be represented by a man who makes no apologies for who he is. The cognitive dissonance provides the humor.
So we were looking forward to seeing what The Four Humors would do with the Oscar Wilde classic The Importance Of Being Earnest. This is the classic broad Victorian farce of two London men with convenient lies, who find those lies no longer so convenient when it comes to courting women with arbitrary requirements. There is much to and fro as the men attempt to satisfy their women, all while dancing around the impositions of the imposing Aunt Augusta.
In retrospect, the fact that Earnest is already a farce should have been a clue – achieving the same heights of surprise attained in Lolita might be more difficult. And, in fact, our expectations were not satisfied.
Which is not to say this is an unworthy production! If you simply desire to see Earnest, this is certainly a competent production of the classic. There are minor problems, of course – Wilde’s dialogue is nearly a “patter”, if you take my meaning, and several times the cast wasn’t quite up to the task – enunciation was slightly off. Fortunately, there was only a small attempt from the cast of producing a British accent. The casting of Christian Bardin, a female actor, as Jack was certainly interesting, but we found the contrast in heights between her and Ryan Lear, who plays Algernon, to be distracting, although at one point the two exchange an accidental kiss, which I do not believe is part of the script. I wondered if there was going to be a subtext to this production, perhaps playing off of Wilde’s predilection for homosexual behavior, for which he was infamously imprisoned and broken.
On the other hand, the butlers (played by Jason Ballweber) were quietly delightful, and Brighid Burkhalter’s disinterested delivery of her dialog declaring her passion for Jack was a lovely descant to the lively exclamations of Jack and Algernon. And the staging of the play at The Southern Theater consisted of adding a temporary audience area opposite the traditional seating, effectively turning this into a thrust stage, and adding an important element of intimacy for the audience.
In retrospect, the only real problem with the play was our own too-high expectations of what this troupe might produce. When faced with a play which is a farce already, making a farce of a farce is a challenge which might wilt the strongest spear of broccoli. So ultimately the fault lay with us. Having already seen what may have been their best work (Lolita), we now saw them try a different path to the same pinnacle, and they didn’t quite get there. Don’t get me wrong – it was still a pleasant romp on a warm winter’s night. Perhaps the fault lies with the selection of play. Maybe if they had selected a more serious or mundane play and applied their magic, the result would have showed more of the Four Humors spark.
Might we suggest a Four Humors adaptation of Oedipus Rex?
The Importance of Being Earnest plays at The Southern Theater February 17-25, 2017.
